“I’m exhausted,” said the medium in a fatigued voice. “You will have to return to me another day--alone. All that I can say to you now, I have said. Beware of opals, and of a red-haired man. Your lucky stone is the turquoise--you should wear light blue, claret colour, and all shades of yellow, and avoid pinks, reds and purple.” She stopped. Elsie, though awestruck, was also vaguely disappointed. It did not seem to her that she had learnt a great deal about Irene, and the warnings about colours and precious stones might have come out of any twopenny booklet off a railway bookstall, such as “What Month Were You Born In?” or “Character and Fortune Told by Handwriting.” Then she remembered that she herself had made Madame Clara angry by laughing, and that the woman had said the current was broken. “Probably she’s furious,” Elsie thought, “and she won’t tell me as much as she told Ireen. And she’s got our money, too. What a swindle!” “What about my friend?” said Irene Tidmarsh. Her voice sounded rather sulky. “Your friend is a sceptic,” said the clairvoyante coldly. “No, really----” Elsie began. The woman turned towards her so abruptly that she was startled. She could discern an enormous pair of heavy-looking dark eyes gazing into hers. “Make your mind a blank--relax,” said Madame Clara, her tone once more a commanding one. Elsie moved uneasily in her chair and fixed her eyes on the crystal. She could only see it faintly, a glassy spot of uncertain outline. The seeress bent forward, leaning over the transparent globe. After a moment or two she began to speak, with the same voice and intonation that she had made use of in speaking about Irene. “The crystal reflects all things, but Time is an arbitrary division made by man--we do not always see what is past, and what is future.... In your case, there is very little past--how young you are!--and what there is, is all on one plane, the physical. You are magnetic, extraordinarily magnetic. You have known men--you are married, if not by man’s law, then by nature’s law--you will know other men. But you are not awake--your mind is asleep. Nothing is awake but your senses....” Elsie’s mouth was dry. She longed to stop the woman but a horrible fascination kept her silent, tensely listening. “Now you are bored--satiated. You have repeated the same experience again and again, young as you are, until it means nothing to you. You have no outside interests--and you are ceaselessly craving for a new emotion.” Abruptly the sibyl dropped on to a dark note. “It will come. I see love here--love that you have never known yet. There will be jealousy, intrigue--letters will pass--beware of the written word----_Ah!_” The exclamation was so sudden and so piercing that Elsie uttered a stifled scream. But this time she was not rebuked. Madame Clara, all at once, was calling out shrilly in a hard voice, an indescribable blend of horror and excitement in her tone: